CHAPTER ONE #2
‘Absolutely brilliant,’ Patrick said. ‘You’re right, the author was foreshadowing the great flood with the reference to the ostriches. Now, about this semicolon . . .’
Dot watched the family tableau as if she were a strange and entirely separate organism.
‘Here you are, Dot.’ Archie handed her a cup of Eyreish tea. ‘You alright? Not like you to be late to dinner.’
Dot shrugged. Archie seemed, for a moment, as if he were about to pry but decided against it.
For this, she loved him all the more. If he had asked, she would have told him about the carpet bag beneath her bed, which had been half-packed for a year or more, about the waves of panic that kept her awake until sunrise, about the dropped plates at the Divers’ Café and the crying in the storeroom and about how terribly miserable her life felt because there was only one thing in the world she wanted and she could not have it.
She saw herself swept along with the rest of her family.
There sat Florence, who had grown up a few houses down on Lamprey Road, now about to give birth to the first of five, perhaps, six children.
There was Willard, with no interest in working anywhere besides the trout cannery.
Celia, who would someday marry one of the boys from her class.
Her father, who had never left Seafarthing.
Her mother, whose only joy was the amber liquid in her glass.
Dot played the role of the middle child – ill, disappointing, and less remarkable than the children born before and after her.
‘I’ve been working with a couple of spirits,’ said Archie, interrupting her thoughts.
Dot rubbed her eyes. ‘Spirits?’ she asked. ‘Really?’
‘They’re as common as anything once you’re closer to the city.
’ He took a drink of his tea. ‘The spirits think the South Sea cuttlefish migrate clockwise around the archipelago near the South Pole. It’ll be a big trip.
Six months, I’d say, at least. We’ve a crew for it, and it’ll be cold.
Very cold. Wool socks, three pairs at a time.
’ He paused. ‘We might have room for one more, if you’d like? ’
Dot gawked.
Then, a slow grin spread across her face.
But her grandfather’s words were heard by the rest of Dot’s family and the fleeting dream was dashed against the cliffs.
‘Absolutely not.’
‘She can’t go on a fishing trawler.’
‘Grandad,’ said Willard, ‘that is a ridiculous idea. Look at her. She’s like one of those little dogs who faint when they get excited. She’s about to faint right now.’
‘I am not,’ said Dot, clutching onto the wall beside her.
Willard looked upon Dot with absolute disdain.
‘You seem like you might,’ said Celia. ‘You’ve gone quite pale.’
‘Shush, Cece,’ said Patrick, standing. ‘Dad, I know you mean well, but you can’t get carried away on an idea like this without first discussing it with us. Dottie’s health isn’t up to it. Surely you can see this is beyond her?’
Dot opened her mouth to argue but her father fixed her with a stare. She shrank.
Her grandfather shrugged. ‘I think it should be up to Dorothy.’
‘She’s too much like you.’ Martha gave a sigh. ‘She’ll go even if she knows she shouldn’t, and she’ll collapse right off the side of the bloody boat. I’m sorry, Dot. We need to be realistic.’
‘Martha—’
‘Don’t you start, Archie,’ said Martha. ‘I let her go to the university, didn’t I? I let her get that job at the café? She has everything she needs.’
‘We’ve done so much for you, Dot,’ her father said. His words tightened around her throat. ‘You should be grateful.’
Dot opened her mouth to respond, but no words came. Her ears felt as if they were filling with water. Her breathing quickened. The room turned hot and started to spin. She saw herself turning into her father, middle-aged, grumpy and trapped forever in this cottage.
‘I—’
Black baubles burst in her vision.
‘Archie,’ said Martha, crossing the room, ‘you’ve upset her.’
‘I—’
Martha reached for her daughter but, as she did, Dot slid from the wall and collided with the floor.
When Dot awoke, she was in her bed and the moon was high. Her faculties were foggy and it took her a moment to remember: the trawler, the argument, the panic crashing upon her like great tidal waves. Distantly, she heard the rumble of the ocean. Dot glanced at the clock. It was just past midnight.
Fatigue weighed on every fibre of her. It was almost impossible to roll over – almost impossible to reach for her tonic. She did it anyway, wincing, forcing her aching arm through the air until she clasped the phial. She drank a mouthful and relished the burn.
The doctors had never formally diagnosed her. One had said it was neurasthenia. Another had told her she had Bellastor’s disease. Another had said it was entirely imaginary.
There would be no trip to the South Pole with Archie.
Dot realised now that she had been quite stupid to even consider it given the odd animosity between her father and grandfather.
It was a peripheral thing, existing in the subtext of clipped sentences.
Perhaps it was something to do with her grandmother’s death; perhaps they were simply too different.
If something were to happen to her while on Archie’s ship, her father would never forgive him.
The tonic warmed Dot’s belly. Some of the heaviness lifted, and she looked around her childhood room.
She drew back the curtain and peeked at the oil-black river flowing into the ocean.
The silhouette of a lonely water bird pecked at the sandy bank.
This was Dot’s home. She loved her family. She belonged here. She was grateful.
But she could not stand another moment in this cottage.
Dot padded out of the room, down the hall and into the kitchen.
The fire glowed within its hearth. With some difficulty, she filled a copper kettle and heaved it over the embers.
The paper-wrapped package of ambergris left by her grandfather was still sitting on the counter.
She took it, and all the little phials of tonic from the cupboard beside the sink, and the packets of leftover ingredients: lavender, chantarelle, crushed cockles, garlic.
They would all be needed when she brewed her next batch.
When the kettle had heated, she brought it into her room and poured it into the basin that sat on her bureau.
Dot washed herself quickly, shivering between wipes of the cotton cloth in the dim lamplight.
Once she was done, she pulled on her trousers, a shirt and her wool coat, feeling damp and sickly.
Dot tugged the carpet bag out from beneath her bed.
She folded the last of her practical clothing: felted skirts, darned stockings, modest blouses and woollen jumpers, all grey and brown and beige.
Into the bag they went. Dot wedged in the package from Archie and the spare ingredients and the phials of tonic, methodically checking that the stoppers were in place.
In went her journal. Her toothbrush. Her headache tablets and hand cream and every single item she could possibly need.
She had dreamed of this moment ever since she had first purchased the blurry photograph from the carpet seller.
She now plucked that image from the wall and stared at it for one longing moment.
It was her only evidence of the existence of the tea shop.
Dot placed the photograph carefully in her journal.
Then, she made her bed and straightened her things and fluffed her pillows and looked around at the shabbiness that had raised her.
She would be back. After all, she was cut from the cloth of this grey little town where it snowed half the year, where the bellow of the ocean was audible from every room in every cottage.
She was a thing of sand and sea foam and summers spent catching crickets in the river grass.
Dot closed her bedroom door. She tiptoed past Celia’s room and the room that had once been Willard’s. She drew her fingers along the walls that had watched her carry in pinecones to paint for the winter festival and a baby seagull she had saved from the neighbour’s cat.
This was not a family where people ran away. This, she knew, was a betrayal.
Dot turned to the entry table, holding the letter she had scribbled on her twenty-third birthday a few months prior.
She had written and rewritten that same letter every few weeks for the past several years.
Each time she had burned her goodbyes and congratulated herself for abstaining from this ridiculous daydream.
For who would travel all the way to the city of Alliaster in search of a place and person that couldn’t possibly exist?
Yet, as Dot scrubbed tea cups in the Divers’ Café sink day after day, her thoughts had always returned to the photograph that the carpet seller had promised was indeed of that tea shop.
Dot set her letter down on the table.
The first train would be due just before dawn in the next town over, and it would be a very long walk for her. She opened the door to a night sky boundless and scattered with stars.
Dorothy Louise Walcott stood in the doorway.
Something within her pleaded for her to go back inside and to burn this letter like all the others, but then she heard the rush of the waves and remembered that day, so many years prior, drowning, suspended in the liminality between life and violent nothing.
A voice had spoken to her in the dark: deep, feminine, ethereal and echoing.
Dot shivered. She stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
That day when she was fourteen, she had felt the crackle in her fingertips, a feeling so innate it was more like a memory than a discovery. A mistake had been made; a bargain struck; the sound of Emily’s screams still pierced her nightmares, but the result of all of it?
Dot had woken on the sand of the beach quite certain she had the proclivity for magic. Now she set off into the world, seeking, at long last, the woman who could teach her how to use it.